How Do You Say 'Locavore' in French?

On clear days, when the forceful cold winds known as “mistrals” have carried the clouds and mist away from the horizon, you can see the Alps from the top of Mont Sainte-Victoire. During a recent trip to Aix-en-Provence with other Columbia students, I spent a day hiking the thousand-meter mountain, whose ragged profile is recognizable to anyone who has seen one of Paul Cézanne’s frequent renderings of it on canvas. Breathless from the steep climb, we looked out at the countryside between us and the Alps and saw vineyards, olive trees, and crooked little houses roofed with red tiles. After months spent in cramped, cloudy, and decidedly urban Paris, it was hard to believe that we were still in the same country.

I am no expert in French geography, but every time I have left Paris to explore a different region of this country, I have been shocked by the variety of its terrain and weather. For a nation roughly the size of Texas, France packs in a lot, from the rolling green hills of Bourgogne to the cold, misty cliffs and beaches of Normandy to the dry, rocky landscape of Provence.

But unlike the United States, which has quite a bit more geographical variation in its nearly 10 million square kilometers than France does in just half a million, France also boasts a stunning variety of regional cuisines. Blessed by land and weather that allow a slew of different plants and animals to flourish and by a people and government determined to protect their “patrimoine,” the Hexagon has maintained a wide diversity of cooking styles, even in the present age of industrialization and easy transport. France is famous for its cuisine, but there is no one French cuisine—there are dozens.

France comprises 22 “régions,” each of which contains a few smaller “départements,” of which there are 96 in all. Each region prides itself on any number of specialties based on local ingredients, often including appetizers, entrées, breads, desserts, candies, liqueurs, and almost always wine and cheese.

If the pride that French people take in their local cuisines could be boiled down to one word, it would have to be “terroir.” Translated by my beloved multilingual online dictionary wordreference.com as “terrain,” “soil,” “land,” “ground,” and “earth,” it’s a word that clearly lacks an easy English equivalent. But the idea behind “terroir” is that the taste and character of a food or wine is influenced by the geographical patch from which it comes.

The French take “terroir” so seriously that their government has instituted a system to regulate and label foods claiming to be from certain regions. The Appellation d’origine contrôlée (AOC) label is granted to food products that not only come from a certain region, but also are produced according to traditional methods. The AOC label, like the word “terroir,” is best known in conjunction with wine, but cheeses, butter, poultry and lentils have also earned the AOC marker.

In Paris, as in New York, it’s easy to forget about “terroir.” Paris’ restaurants and markets bring together not only all of France’s regional cuisines, but also all of the world’s cuisines. Massive cosmopolitan cities exist on a unique culinary plane, denying any special attachment to their particular geographical coordinates. It is undeniably wonderful to be able to find escargots, ratatouille, or crêpes—or curries, couscous, or sushi, for that matter—in Paris and New York. But having a world of cuisines at your fingertips makes you forget that food has a geographical context, that ingredients come from the land, that recipes come from local traditions.

Smaller French cities, as my week in Aix taught me, find ways to maintain their distinct regional flavor. I spent one morning at Aix’s vast open-air market basking in the mild weather and staring longingly at the gorgeous local produce: deeply ridged heirloom tomatoes, small unfamiliar dirt-colored root vegetables, merry plump zucchini. Some merchants hawked spices held in cloth-lined baskets you could lift right to your nose to sniff, while others sold silver dollar-sized rounds of chèvre covered in variously hued mold. In a different section of the market, potters sat amid shiny glazed traditional bowls and platters in warm shades of red and yellow.

At a stall selling tapenades and spreads made from local olives, tomatoes, and peppers, a pretty young woman with facial piercings offered samples daubed on small strips of bread. There, I was treated to a mouthful of something I had never before tasted—olive jam. Instead of aggravating the olives’ natural meatiness with salt, the makers of the jam had softened it with sugar. I was delighted.

Would I have enjoyed the jam if I had first tasted it in Paris or New York? Of course. But some of my pleasure, as I stood there chewing, came from being in the land where the olives had been cultivated, standing under the same sunlight that had struck the leaves of the olive trees. In Aix, I was in the right place.